1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to an inbound message management system that individuals use in order to manage communications from businesses with which they have relationships. More specifically, this disclosure is related to providing automated processing of the inbound communications to facilitate more efficient use of the communications by the individual.
2. Related Art
Programs and systems such as Quicken and Mint, now both owned by Intuit Inc., as well as PageOnce, can accept direct input of financial institution access credentials to allow aggregation of financial information for a household in a single place. Similarly, online bill payment systems from financial institutions such as Bank of America and USAA have provided integration with billers via direct input of individual, or household, access credentials for the bill payer's site. These tools may in turn rely on other systems such as Yodlee for interfacing with the financial institutions.
Other tools such as the Organizer product from OtherInbox can automatically analyze, prioritize and summarize emails coming into a user's inbox from institutions. Still other tools such as TripIt allow individual emails to be forwarded to a dedicated email address to facilitate presenting a single view of travel-related information.
Additionally, university research projects such as RADAR (See, e.g., “RADAR: A Personal Assistant that Learns to Reduce Email Overload,” Freed, Carbonell, et al., 2008) have focused on providing virtual assistants for processing and handling email to assist in performing tasks related to those emails.